William Cook has died | Hacker News Reader

William Cook has died

mjtsai.com

150 pointsksec35 comments

Sad to hear. I wrote the original AppleScript documentation and worked closely with William and Warren and the rest of the AppleScript team. It was one of the few teams I worked with in Silicon Valley that had a real sense of community, with regular outings to our favorite taqueria in Mt. View and that great Indian restaurant in the Sunnyvale strip mall, and also impromptu music sessions with William on guitar. He was a great guy who died much too young.

Did you work on Hyperscript? Hyperscript is near and dear to me as it was what my college used for the intro to algorithms CS class.

Genius, really - such an easy to read/understand/use language really freed the professors to teach algorithms, not programming mechanics. And that shit was object-oriented!

It was funny how often our professor would answer "how do I use hypertalk to do ___" with "just write it out" and how often it would work.

I didn't work on HyperTalk, but Kevin Calhoun, who worked on HyperCard 2.0 and 3.0, was just around the corner. AppleScript was spun out of a wildly ambitious project spearheaded by Larry Tesler, the head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group, to make end-user programming a reality, but HyperCard and HyperTalk were arguably far more approachable and productive for end users. And in the end it was AppleScript that survived the internal politics while HC/HT were killed.

Sad to see. His definition of OOP[1] helped to shape my style of programming.

[1]https://wcook.blogspot.com/2012/07/proposal-for-simplified-m...

A very good article. That's exactly how I always thought about objects, essentially just first-class modules.

He was incredibly encouraging for me and other PL designers through WGLD, Onwards, and other PL R&D groups. For me, that was needed motivation to tackle challenges outside the conservative "types & performance" of federally/industrially funded academia. Likewise, I can easily list some great researchers working off the beat track who I bet would say the same. It is a surprisingly small community, so quite an early loss :(

Dr. Cook was probably my favorite professor I've had here at UT. I had the opportunity to learn functional programming from him in both Haskell and Agda through the two PL classes he taught here. May he Rest In Peace.

I took his graduate programming languages class. He was a great teacher.

Took his Haskell PL class and really liked it. Coolest thing I remember was learning about using the return value of a function as it's own argument thanks to Haskell laziness.

He had great lectures and lecture notes. Amazing guy, RIP

Some more info here as well: https://forum.latenightsw.com/t/rip-william-cook/3407.

Which is actually the first link in the blog post. I wanted to include that tweet as well in the second link so submitted this. Unfortunately I think it ends up people not click both of those links.

But I cant change the link any more ( May be @Dang could help? ). So I hope this comments stays on top.

Oh I didn't realize it. I saw some of the headers were links but I was confused and assumed it was a link to the header on the same page.

AppleScript was/is a pretty nifty thing. Fun to experiment with and do things that would normally be very hard (scripting UI).

Is there something equivalent on Windows or Linux?

As far as MacOS goes, has there been any official word on the future of AppleScript? I remember a few years ago they got rid of the team that did most of the work on AppleScript and related thing and it looked like it may have become one of those "we aren't actively killing it but no one cares so will probably die naturally over the next few OS releases" things.

But then they introduced the Shortcuts app for MacOS Monterey earlier this year, and AppleScript is a prominent part of that, which suggests that they still do care about keeping it alive and kicking.

We have Applescript to thank, in part, for podcasting. Adding media enclosures to RSS happened in 2001, but it was in 2003 that iTunes Applescript capabilities were used to transfer audio files automatically from an RSS reader into an iTunes library. I know I personally listened to my first "Podcasts" in 2004, on an original iPod. It wasn't until 2005 that Apple added native podcatching capabilities to iTunes.

I have a small AppleScript in production use at work at this very moment. As a designer-turned-developer, AppleScript was the first tool that let me feel like I could be in greater control over my computer and inspired me to learn Objective-C (this was pre-iOS days).

Accomplished musician as well: http://wcook.org/music/New%20Orleans.mp3

Someone really ought to archive this website.

Done. Should be available in the Internet Archive immediately. I recommend using those URLs for Wikipedia citations to get ahead of link rot.

Posted about it in the Archive Team IRC channel, someone is likely to see and do the needed soon.

William was one of my all-time favorite coworkers. We built AppleScript together. Our work is still in use today. William was also a great friend. He taught me how to finger pick a couple of songs on the acoustic guitar, and the ones I liked best I still play often: Imagine by John Lennon and Hobo's Lullaby by Woody Guthrie. I'm playing those sweet songs now in your remembrance William.

He's not mentioned anywhere on the AppleScript wikipedia page except in the citations section. Seems like a bit of an oversight.

That definitely should be added, with a link to this paper: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/papers/AppleScript/AppleScr...

So add it?

Died at 57 :/ Sad to hear, that's pretty young still.

Metastasis in cancer has no cure and is an unpredictable death. We need to solve this.

mRNA and gene therapy is moving quickly, but not quickly enough for some folks :(

Any ETA?

https://www.modernatx.com/pipeline (Select "Cancer Vaccines" from Modality)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29398187

That's an interesting lineup.

Are the latent vaccines targeted at preventing infection, suppressing symptoms, suppressing the viral shedding that leads to transmission, or potentially an actual cure?

I'm getting really tired of cancer, I have a number of friends and family who have it. Some terminal, some not. Just lost a really good friend at 55 years old four days ago to really aggressive metastatic cancer. It's trite to say 'fuck cancer' but I do feel that way. I really hope we can find a breakthrough in treatment.

I was a UTCS PhD student back in 2013-2016. I was looking forward to taking a graduate class taught by Dr. Cook on programming languages, but the timing didn’t line up. I always considered that to be a bit of a shame, as I knew he was going through cancer treatment in and around that time.

His "On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited (2009)" paper linked from the article was one of the biggest helps for me in making sense of OOP and the relation between OOP and functional programming, early in my programming journey.

Wayy too young

He was a good man and I loved him very much

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